I have been looking for ways to speed up MyBlog editor loading and Google Gears caught my attention. Google Gears is basically a browser plugin by Google that provide additional functionality to your browser, among other things, caching files locally! Bingo.

To get stright to the point, we have  already implemented Google Gears support in our internal release. All javascript, including tinyMCE, css and images files will be loaded from your local cache. The editor now loads significantly faster and I am sure you will be pleased. We'll run a couple more test and will make this feature optional. I can't wait to roll this out!

 

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Last May we were in Chicago for the CMS Expo organized by the good people at Coffee Group, USA, who happens to also organize events for Joomla Chicago user group. At the event, a lot of knowledge was exchanged about Joomla in a highly interactive environment. Many went home, having lots of fun, their questions answered and knowledge gained! The event was highly successful, and due to more than encouraging response, the good guys at Coffee Group decided to hold another CMS Expo, this time, BIGGER with 17 presenters and 26 learning sessions in  two days - more talks, more fun! Winter CMS Expo will be held in Denver, Colorado on December 4^th and 5^th. And we’re going to be there! Azrul will be talking about Advanced Components and Blogging with Joomla. Be sure you’ll be there and don’t miss out on this great event. Check out the details of the Winter CMS Expo here

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We have recently released My Blog 2.0.1 and Jom Comment 3.0.1 which includes pretty much of bug fixes since the initial beta release. Some of you might have been wondering why are there more bug fixes as opposed to new features. The main reason is because we are actually modifying the structure of both these components to have backward compatibilities where they both work on Joomla 1.0 and Joomla 1.5 with the same set of codes.

After making these structural changes, we should see some new features added in the next major release of My Blog and Jom Comment.

You may read more on the changelogs for My Blog 2.0.1 and Jom Comment 3.0.1 at the following locations,

My Blog 2.0.1

Jom Comment 3.0.1

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By now, you should have heard it already. Google launched a new browser called Chrome, which is available for download from http://www.google.com/chrome . My first instinct is to run all our apps through the brand new browser. So, this post kinda act like a test post. And, congratulation to google, all our component works smoothly on Chrome!.

Having a new browser is always tricky, for web developer like us, yet another browser we need to test it against, and testing does take a lot of time. On the other hand, everyone loves to see a better browser. IE sucks and microsoft weren't serious enough to enhance it. Firefox, as good as it is, are known to be extremely greedy when it comes to memory. Sudden lockups are common in Firefox and somehow we all learn to live with it.

Now, google, with its massive programming firepower gives us Chrome with tons of promises. It is still very early to tell, but so far, I am liking it. 

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We’ve actually been thinking about this for some time already, but never came around to it until very recently. Yeah, blame it all on work. We’re so busy developing, answering support tickets, having lunch meetings that we never worked on it, until we organized Joomla Day Malaysia 2008. Joomla Day was a fun community event meant for us all Joomla lovers to gather around and talk about Joomla and share our experiences with Joomla. But during the sessions, we found out that many people would like to know more about the technical know-how of Joomla and building Joomla components.

Last year, we made a mock Joomla Advance User training for the IT department at a local university. What initially started as a 20 participant signed in for the training ended up having doubled the number of participants. We didn’t know that many people wanted to learn more about Joomla! So this year, after considering some requests e-mailed to us for Joomla training, we decided to give it a try to offer the training to Joomla users in Malaysia. The Joomla Training will be run by our very own Azrul Rahim and Toby Patterson from Joomla.org. There will be two types of courses that is one Joomla Advance Users Training and another is Joomla Development Training. We will commence training after September and we’re taking up bookings for the training now. First, if you like, take a look at our Joomla Training Page . If you’d like to book a place, you know where to find us!

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We are in the process of phasing out http://support.azrul.com site. Instead, we will launch a new members site at http://members.azrul.com . All existing users at our support site should be able to login to the new members site using their existing username(email) and password.

Why the move ?

1. Support.azrul.com is using Kayako software with limited customization ability. Even the download section is hacked in a way it is not meant to be. It works, but it become very hard for us to offer new support services and options to our user.
   
   
2. support.azrul.com knowledgebase were not fully utilized. The articles were harder to format and maintained from the backend.
   
   
3. The new members.azrul.com site is powered by Joomla 1.5 . Since we are VERY good at coding for Joomla 1.5, we want the ability to customize and fine tune our user's experience. We are planning to integrate our own custom-coded component download and ticket system.

Over the next few days, I will send out a newsletter and post a proper news regarding this changes. Our payment system has already been integrated with the new members site and the knowledgebase is being expanded on a daily basis.

Please head to http://members.azrul.com and do drop us a line and let us know what you think.

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Thanks to all the participants of Joomla Day and all those who helped out – the team at Azrul.com, Toby Patterson from Joomla.org and the crew from Joomla-my.org. Without the long days and nights from all, we couldn’t have pulled off the day’s event! Anyway you guys and gals, the day was a fun filled event and it was a day where those in the Joomla community finally get to meet each other and get to know each one another better and have something fruitful came out of the meeting! During the day, we had Toby Patterson, our own residents, Mark Lee and Azrul Rahim, Lee CY, Syed Fuqaha and Shaiffulnizam take turns to talk about Joomla! Food was abundant, we were served with buffet for breakfast, lunch and tea! The environment was relaxed as we spent getting to know each other, learning more about Joomla and exchanging information on how we could use Joomla in enhancing our website and achieve what we want on the Internet. Our sponsors were generous in sponsoring for the t-shirts and other prizes for the event. Thanks to iJoomla, Joomlart, Packt Publishing and many others (forgive me, the list is just too long!), not forgetting MDeC and the friendly people at Exabytes. For us, it was a great experience in organizing an event and it broaden our experience in meeting more people and getting to know them. Here’s to our next event next year! Don’t forget to take a sneak at our photo’s for the event at our Picasa Album .

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This week is quite a hectic week for us. On top of working on JomComment 3.0 and MyBlog 2.0 , we are also in charge of organizing Joomla Daya Malaysia 2008. We are always committed to spread Joomla! love around, especially at our hometown, Malaysia. This would be our 2nd year organizing JoomlaDay as project manager, with help from Joomla-My community.

We actually have no idea that there are just so many Joomla user in Malaysia. We originally prepare the venue and the event for 150 participant, but we quickly run out of seat and had to open an extra 50 seat, which again were snapped very very quickly.

For JDay this year, Toby Patterson from Joomla.org  will be giving a talk on Joomla 1.5 and component development. I will also give a talk on Joomla 1.5 template development. A couple of local Joomla expert will guide new users to get their site up and running.

If any of you guys are coming, I hope to see you there!

And, special thanks to our JDay sponsors, ExaBytes, MDeC, Cari.com.my and a couple of 3rd party developer , Vince from Joomres, Alledia, Mike Simbunch, Packt Publishing, Chicago Joomla user/Cofee group USA, Ninjoomla and iJoomla.

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Recently, I was trying to write a blog entry here via My Blog and all of a sudden Firefox decided to CRASH itself @.@ and I can't restore the previous session for some reason. It's really a PITA when I have to re-write the blog entries :(

I think My Blog should have an auto drafting feature where it allows a blog entry to be automatically saved while you are typing or maybe when there is an idle activity of 5 seconds.

What do you think?  Maybe it's just me being unlucky :(

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After a long wait, we finally released the beta versions of both My Blog 2.0 and Jom Comment 3.0 . You can actually access both these release in the following forums,

Jom Comment 3.0 - http://forum.azrul.com/index.php/topic,3066.0.html

My Blog 2.0 - http://forum.azrul.com/index.php/topic,3065.0.html

* You will have to be a valid user that owns a license to be in the beta users lists. If you are a license owner and if you are not registered yet in our forums, just register yourself and send a private message to 'Mark' or 'azrul' with the 'Beta tester request' as the title.

I bet that many of you are wondering what changes are there in both these releases. While I can list some of the changes, I can't really list them all as there are too many to remember and I have a pretty bad memory. ;( Anyway, here are some of the changes in both these new versions

Jom Comment 3.0

- Multi lingual support (Quite a popular one ;] )
- New comment templates (The new template is really sweet)
- Importing utilities from MXComments (Doesn't support special encoded characters yet)
- Reduced server loads by minimizing the scripts that is loaded.
- Recaptcha support
.... and many more

My Blog 2.0

- New intuitive dashboard design (Glossy look yeaha!!)
- Meta options are now added in the dashboard
- Tag slugs (Customize what you want the URL to look like for tags)
- Trackbacks support.
- Email notification when user creates a new blog!
.... and many more

Enjoy yourselves with this new beta release and PLEASE DO NOT INSTALL IT ON A LIVE SITE. ;)

====== Just another great production from Azrul.com======

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